My father has no backbone no spine.He sits on the couch pressing his luck.During the Olympics he scratched his headwith a wooden spoon now and then—grunted and complained about his pain.The grey cat Auden curls next to himwormy and adoring. He scolds Auden, shush, shush,the Olympics. On right now are the personal storiesabout the figure skaters. Showing the womenbeyond the rink. Beyond the clean edgesthey make with their skates.Past their unfortunate falls.

These lines speak of the deep singularity of the poet searching and living in the bitter sweetness of finding and not finding, encountering and turning up items almost by accident fool/wise genius shaman who has passed the torch to his deputy in charge here. (His name is Tom Clark) What will he show us that is familiar and surprising at the same time? I think it is this here. This home here.

The wonderful bits about the birds to which WB draws our attention reflect a long period of looking and in-dwelling for this poet.

Dorn was a chorological -- or to use the term of his master in the study of the morphology of landscape, the geographer Carl O. Sauer, "areal" -- writer. The lonesome or apart quality in his nature which informs his lyric voice found its always tentative, always uncertain locations in the scattered Western places through which he passed as an itinerant in his first decade as a poet. In these travels he became a self-taught person of learning, largely thanks to small town libraries (he has a fascinating essay in which he recounts "Libraries I Have Known"). One of the writers he learned to deeply admire in these years was the great naturalist W.H. Hudson. Reading Hudson when he was a struggling marginal farm laborer in Burlington, Washington in the 1950s led him to inspect the skies, to find auguries and omens in the passages of birds, an ancient poetic concentration. One of his finest prose writings, and perhaps the most poetic of all his evocations of space, is the 1958 essay , "Notes from the Fields: Skagit Valley".

It begins:

"The meadow larks and the crows don't exist for each other. The lark is apparently always in flight. There is no question that the meadow lark is the loveliest of flying things... What flying! The sheer exactitude of flying complexly and exhaustively, on the air, at that slight height, to the near ground..."

Dorn's areal projections of distance in this period were often as if lifted on the wings of birds.

Living in meadow lark country the last twenty years, I appreciate. My backyard is in town, though, so I mostly see lots of vultures, all the yard birds, and occasional hawks. Bats and hummingbirds. Prairie paradise.

What Dorn and I shared and share...There was a Walnut Grove on the Greenview Farm, Greenview Illinois. My grandfather's favorite farm. Stands of Walnut among the ahead of their time round chicken coops. The coops lasting longer than the trees, which were "harvested" for use in making furniture. My childhood bed was made of Walnut.

Furnish my soul with hope. There's a Walnut grove and a chicken coop in my soul.

Mom found the house.Dad, the harvest.Montgomery County, Maryland,west of Swain's Lock on the C&O Canal,1953-55. New transplantsfrom Chester and Paoli, Pennsylvania,in our eastward migration, Dad'sjob search. Born in Springfield, Illinois,at 16 with the Illinois Central Railroadin Chicago, somehow he also knew black walnuts.At our River Road rental he found them,loved the smell and stain,fun at the fireplace hammering hard black nutson a piece of rail, using ornate pickersto tease near perfect meats from shellfor instant munching and Mom's recipes,never bettered or repeated.

Always remembered in the woodshop wherein my 30s and 40s I worked walnut.Love its smell. Moved westto Iowa, Dad 20 years gone.Got a job on a walnut farm, plantingtrees and herbs and grasses.Walnuts grow in my yard but I seldomharvest them the way some Amish do.Next year I might,if there's nothing else to do.

The chicken coop was southeast of Pulaskion a semi-Amish farmIts owners, a married couplewith grown children,had bought it from an Amish familywho made the best blackberry pie.They dressed and lived and farmedin some ways Amish, though they weren't.I saw their ad in Countrysideand drove to work as often as I couldon their 80, working horses,talking Wendell Berry, Henri Nouwen and Dorothy Day,looking after the cows and the chickensfor a start,until they upped and moved to Illinois.